As telecommunications networks grow in complexity and the range of telecommunications services expands, the process of provisioning services—configuring the network to provide new services—is also becoming ever more complex. Existing approaches to service provisioning can be inflexible and inefficient, which can have a negative impact on a service operator's ability to provide a wide range of services, and to quickly implement new services. The definition of provisioning processes for new network services can be cumbersome and often requires detailed knowledge of network structures and device configuration. Service provisioning itself can, for complex services, involve many network configuration steps, which often results in slow turnaround of provisioning requests. The present invention seeks to alleviate some of these problems.